Is sleeping alongside your baby safe?

The official line is don't sleep alongside your baby. But more parents are choosing to do it and there are reasons why.

Co-sleeping has become one of the hottest debates in parenting circles. Despite health and safety recommendations to not share the bed, many families are ignoring the advice. Research shows 80% of babies share their parents’ bed at some time in the first 6 months, and for more than two hours a night. Some parents co-sleep because they favour a child-led approach to parenting and enjoy the closeness and comfort of the family bed. Others never planned to, but found it a better alternative to the disruption of night feeds, settling and poor sleeping patterns. But the ultimate reason for co-sleeping is that – for both mother and baby – it feels right.

Doing what comes naturally

"In the hospital, I had a vision that I’d keep Elsa in a bassinet next to me," recalls Sophie Tonkinwise, a Sydney mother of two. “But she was crying and crying. The midwife suggested I feed her in the bed. So I did and from that night she slept brilliantly, which is why I kept it up once we were home. I didn’t need to get vertical and I didn’t feel sleep-deprived.”

Dad, Cameron, adapted quickly to a baby in the bed. Elsa co-slept for six months, by which time Sophie felt she was demanding too much breastfeeding. When Esther came along, she co-slept for four months only, because Elsa would come in early and wake her.

For Melbourne dad, Jim Minifie, co-sleeping was not on the agenda – but baby Anindo slept badly and he and his wife Avino were dog-tired. “It made sense for Avino to breastfeed in bed,” he says. “It made everyone’s life much easier.” Anindo, now 2½, is still breastfeeding and still in the big bed: she doesn’t have one of her own.

With the arrival of a new baby it’s now four in a bed, some of the time. “The baby’s still in the bassinet, but she’ll often come in for an extended visit and I can see where it’s heading!” says Jim. So far, it’s been a total pleasure for Jim. “We know early childhood is brief, and we want to get the maximum enjoyment from it,” he says.

The case against

Safety remains the major argument against co-sleeping. The incidence of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) has created an understandable culture of fear around sleeping habits. Although the SIDS rate has dropped from 563 deaths in 1986 to 134 in 2000, there is still evidence that co-sleeping increases the risk of fatalities – at least in certain circumstances.

Experts say that getting all the safety factors in place is difficult to regulate, and creates a complicated message to parents which doesn’t work. They say that for babies up to 6 months the only safe advice is: Don’t co-sleep. However, co-sleeping remains common in 90% of the world’s population, claim the advocates of co-sleeping. In China, where co-sleeping is the norm, SIDS is so rare it doesn’t have a name.

Cultural conditioning

In Westernised societies it’s long been standard practice to advise parents against sleeping alongside their children. Even in the late 1980s parents were advised not only to get the newborn out of the bed, but out of the same room. Aside from safety and ‘a good night’s sleep’, many other child-rearing issues were dragged into it: encouraging independence, parents’ need for space. It was assumed that co-sleeping wrecked your sex life.

Another spin-off was the pathologising of sleep, and a whole range of sleep-training dogmas; let-cry, controlled crying and other routines claiming to overcome the nightly disruption of feeds and settling – disruptions that rarely occur with co-sleeping.

Now there is more acknowledgement of a mother’s instinct to be with her child and the resulting improvement in sleep quality. We now know that independence is attained not through early separation, but by meeting children’s needs so they feel secure enough to advance to the next stage.

The blessing of science

Official attitudes to long-term co-sleeping have changed. Once it was a threat to a child’s independence. Now it has the blessing of science, with a leading British expert saying it’s best for children to sleep by their parents until they are 5 years old.

Margot Sunderland, director for education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, is author of The Science of Parenting. The book sifts the scientific evidence which shows that separating babies from parents increases the stress levels in their brain – especially when left to cry. Co-sleeping promotes the healthiest type of sleep.

She is so sure of the evidence that she is calling for health visitors to have fact sheets on the benefits of co-sleeping. “They can have separation anxiety up to the age of 5 and beyond, which can affect them in later life,” she said in a recent interview with the BBC. “Studies from around the world show that cosleeping is an investment for the child.”

Sleep on it

The consensus is that co-sleeping makes for less disruption, bonding, a secure child and long-term health benefi ts. It does not inhibit independence, and it needn’t ruin your sex life: use alternative venues, move the child temporarily, be creative! Studies show that if the safety measures are in place (see box), the risk of SIDS is less because parents are sensitive to a baby’s breathing. The risk of SIDS is greater if the baby sleeps where it can’t be monitored.

But as with many parenting issues, best practice is a matter of trial and error, and individual preference. There’s no one size fits all. There are many ways for kids to sleep, and some parents see them all in the course of a night. It can take months to work out, so if you haven’t yet, keep sleeping on it!

We collect information about the content (including ads) you use across this site and use it to make both advertising and content more relevant to you on our network and other sites. This is also known as Online Behavioural Advertising. You can find out more about our policy and your choices, including how to opt-out here